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Clad in a too-big track suit, her short hair graying and with deep, dark circles etched under her eyes, Patricia Dagorn looked nothing like the Riviera’s most famous femme fatale as she stood in the defendant’s dock of a Nice courtroom last week.

But to the legions of elderly retired teachers, builders and even a retired cop and pilot that she is accused of seducing and poisoning, she was a sexy soulmate who promised them another chance at love.

And in order to win her affection, some of the men promised to loan her money and may have even inflated their own net worth to impress her, prosecutors told a packed courtroom during France’s most sensational trial in recent memory.

Such boasts, for at least two besotted elderly Romeos, proved deadly at the hands of the woman dubbed the “Black Widow of the Cote d’Azur.”

As a judge handed down a 22-year sentence Thursday to the disheveled Dagorn for the murder of two elderly men, some wondered whether there could be more victims on the French Riviera who had been plied with her signature Valium-laced cocktails and then forced to sign over all of their assets.

“Manipulator!” hissed one of her victims.

“Diabolical woman!” said another.

A sketch of Dagorn in court in January 2018.Getty Images

Ange Pisciotta, an 82-year-old retired electrician from Nice who testified at the four-day trial, said that in 2011 Dagorn stole his computer and tried to take control of his savings after she began poisoning him with Valium.

Another victim, a retired pilot, told authorities that he knew that Dagorn was lying to him but he didn’t complain as long as they were having regular sex.

Although her victims told the court they were disgusted with the 57-year-old Dagorn and her “perverse” tactics, perhaps many of these educated, mostly professional men may be angrier at themselves for being so naive — having fallen so easily into the black widow’s web.’

‘Like a ray of sunshine in winter’

“The Riviera was an El Dorado for her to live out what she had always wanted to be — a businesswoman,” said one of the prosecutors at Dagorn’s trial.

Her marks were lonely, elderly men drawn from a wide swath of the region’s picturesque seaside towns. Curiously, many were named Robert, and investigators suggested that she may have targeted them as some kind of twisted revenge against her own father or foster parent, who had abandoned her when she was a child.

Dagorn posted small ads in local newspapers saying she was searching for an elderly “soulmate” or visited local match-making agencies, posing as a successful businesswoman.

Robert Vaux, 91, a widower from Frejus, said he nearly died after a brief affair with Dagorn. Neatly clad in a suit, maroon tie and trench coat, the white-haired Vaux made the 40-minute trip from his home in the French resort town to testify against his former lover.

Robert Vaux, one of the alleged victims, arrives at court in France.Getty Images

“She was like a ray of sunshine in winter,” he told reporters before Dagorn’s trial got underway. “When you are with a younger woman you know it won’t last but you don’t deny yourself the moment unless you’re a masochist.”

But during the three months that he lived with Dagorn in his sunny villa, Vaux’s life began to resemble a film noir. Suddenly, he began to feel sick and disoriented. His doctor told him that he was being poisoned with Valium, and his pharmacist joked that if he survived, he could write his own “romance noir,” he said. During her short affair with Vaux, Dagorn wrote letters to his bank and sent a fax to Vaux’s lawyer demanding all of his assets, court records show.

Turning into a criminal to survive

Patricia Dagorn was born in Paris in 1960, and lived in the French capital and on a farm in Brittany that belonged to her mother’s family.

Her mother worked as a housekeeper in Paris and gave up Patricia to foster care when she was 6 years old.

“She has no remembrance of any kind of affection from her parents,” said a police investigator.

At her trial, her team of lawyers used her bleak background to paint Dagorn as a tragic victim of circumstances.

Attorney Georges Rimondi called Dagorn “fragile” and said that she denied all the charges against her. Another lawyer, Cedric Houissoud, told the court she had already suffered a great deal.

Dagorn, nicknamed “The Black Widow of the Riviera.”Getty Images

When she was 14, a man named Robert, who may have been her foster father or her biological father, took her camping at a nude resort in the south of France, according to Paris Match, which published a photo of a teenaged Dagorn posing nude except for a pair of sandals in 2013.

Soon after the visit to the resort, Dagorn found herself living on the streets of Paris and quickly turning into a petty criminal to survive.

Four years later, when she was 21, she met Luc Caron, the man who would become her husband and father of her two sons. Caron credits himself with rescuing Dagorn from the streets.

“She had the face of an angel,” Caron told Paris Match. “I fell blindly in love.”

But life with Caron proved difficult. Dagorn accused her ex-husband of rape, torture and subjecting her to 11 years of “isolation” in the southwest of France, in a region known for its production of Armagnac and foie gras.

Dagorn gave up her own sons to foster care, and somehow managed to complete a law degree although she never took the bar exam.

The couple divorced in 2005, and Dagorn took off for the Riviera where she posed as a the proprietor of a pizzeria and a jewelry boutique in the small ads she took out in local papers and on dating web sites.

‘When you are with a younger woman you know it won’t last but you don’t deny yourself the moment unless you’re a masochist.’

An undated photograph that Nice Matin splashed on its front page on the first day of her sensational trial last week shows a svelte Dagorn on a sailboat, wielding a fishing spear. She smiles for the camera in mirrored sunglasses, tight jeans and a white T-shirt emblazoned with a black and white image of Marilyn Monroe.

One of her sons, now 27, told a reporter that his mother was “obsessed with money.”

The son, who is estranged from his mother and identified himself only as Guilhem, said he last saw Dagorn in the seaside resort city of
Cannes where she readily admitted that she was seducing an elderly man in order to make off with his assets. She referred to her prey as “a pigeon,” Guilhem said.

‘A Machiavellian poisoner’

It was the seduction of one of her “pigeons” that landed her in prison five years ago. And it started Nice authorities on the investigation that would lead to her murder conviction last week in the cold cases of the mysterious deaths of two elderly men in the south of France.

In 2012, Dagorn hooked up with a retired economics professor and tried to poison him slowly with Valium and whiskey cocktails. She also laced his food with the drug, court records say.

Dagorn then demanded that Robert Mazereau, 87, put all of his assets in her name. It was the elderly man’s daughter who noticed her father’s decline, and found him completely disoriented. She alerted authorities, who immediately went after Dagorn.

After they arrested Dagorn, police found a suitcase full of Valium, methadone, passports, identity cards, banking and real estate documents in the names of several elderly men who lived in different parts of the Riviera.

“If Madame Dagorn hadn’t lugged her life in her suitcase, the trial in Nice … wouldn’t have taken place,” a police officer told Nice Matin. It’s not clear whether had a fixed address, or what she did with the money that she managed to steal from her victims.

After Dagorn was convicted of fraud and theft in the Mazereau case in 2013 — “a Machiavellian poisoner,” prosecutors said — police revisited the two suspicious deaths.

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Michel Knefel, a 67 year-old transient, was found lying in a pool of blood in a hotel room he had shared with Dagorn in Nice in July 2011.

Although there were traces of Valium in his blood, police concluded at the time that Dagorn was not involved, and after questioning her, they let her go.

Police also re-examined the death of Franceso Filippone, an 85-year-old retired mason whose decomposing body was found in the bathtub of his home in the hills behind Cannes in February 2011. Just before his death, Dagorn had cashed a check from Filippone worth $25,000. She told authorities that the money was a gift to help her open a jewelry boutique.

This time police weren’t buying her stories, and Dagorn was charged with murder while she was serving out her fraud sentence.

At the jury trial in Nice last week, prosecutors described Dagorn as a dangerous psychopath, and requested the maximum 30-year sentence for
murder.

“When she denies everything she’s not telling the truth,” prosecutor Annie Brunet-Fuster told the court. “When she doesn’t want to go back on what she’s said she just invents something else.”

When she took the stand in her own defense last week, Dagorn vigorously refuted that she was poisoning elderly men and stealing their assets. She admitted to being “very good friends” with the two men who died.